


Young, Never Changed

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Nail Polish, adam has a cold but this isnt like? a sickfic, i rlly dont know wht to tag her as, that's all this is yall :/, thts just a background fact of the story idk how to explain it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 19:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13488693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Sometimes caring is made up of the little things.





	Young, Never Changed

**Author's Note:**

> me? write a long oneshot that fits well into tbs's canonical timeline? its less likely than you think
> 
> title from wild heart by bleachers

Caleb debated the pros and cons of doorbell v. knocking for longer than he'd ever admit. It was rare that he ever arrived on the Hayes' doorstep and found it Adam-less, so he wasn't entirely sure where to go. 

It was the no doubt liquifying ice cream in the bag tucked under his arm that finally pushed him to knock. 

The door creaked open to reveal Mrs. Hayes, slick gray suit pieced together and demanding heels on her feet. Her eyes took a moment to focus in on him.

"Hey, Mrs. Hayes," he greeted warmly, ignoring the neutrality that always oozed off of her in swaths of Light Gray.

"Hello, Caleb," she said, doing her best to extend her tight-lipped smile into something more natural.

Both the Doctors Hayes were awkward as hell, Caleb had found, and they didn't really know how to interact with him. He'd seen a lot more of Adam's mom, though, and she at least tried to make their interactions as painless as she could.

"Uh, is Adam awake?"

Her eyes lit, a tangible representation of the Orange Creme wafting off of her. "Oh, I'm sorry, come in, Caleb. And yes he is, still in bed, though."

He nodded. "Yeah, I figured he would be. Can I put this in the freezer?" he asked, raising the bag slightly.

"Of course." She didn't wait for a response. "I've got some hostess duties tonight that I couldn't get out of that I need to get back to prepping for. Ah, why don't you hand me that and I'll put it in the freezer while you head upstairs, I know Adam will be more than pleased to see you.

"Oh. Thanks."

"You're welcome. I'm sorry to usher you off like this - it's good to see you, Caleb."

"You too, Mrs. Hayes," he replied truthfully, before heading off toward Adam's room.

"Oh, and Caleb? Door open, please."

"Yes, ma'am," he stammered, cheeks heating as he barreled toward the staircase.

The banister wound upward in a sleek line. Stained and sealed cherry wood gliding under his hand as he followed it. 

The Hayes' house was endlessly modern, with crisp gray walls and taupe accents. It was like they'd chosen a predesigned character and never bothered to customize it.

His eyes tracked the family portraits on the wall, thin smiles and awkward tilts of the head being reoccurring motifs. The only one who ever looked like they were having fun was Adam, ages five to twelve.

Caleb smiled a little, his favorite picture coming into view. It was sometime long ago, if the amount of color Adam was wearing was any indication. He bore a choppy bowl cut, the one every boy that age seemed to have had, a missing front tooth, dimpled, red cheeks, and the most reckless smile.

He had to have been no older than six, wearing the ugliest windbreaker jacket/pants combo known to man. 90s green and pink, even though the year was most certainly early-2000s, in an appalling arrow-type pattern.

Caleb laughed softly at it, as he did every time, before crossing the hall to bump Adam's door open with his hip.

"The cavalry has arrived," Caleb called, taking in his pitiful boyfriend where he lay curled up in his bed, navy blue comforter pulled tight around him.

Adam smiled slightly, his irritated nose crinkling with happiness. Flu Green and Pale Yellow sprouted from him, calling gently to Caleb.

"Hey," he called, though his stuffed nose distorted the syllable like a ball of paper crinkled into a phone's receiver.

"How're you feeling?" Caleb asked, dropping down on the edge of the bed to kick his sneakers off - knowing it was a pet peeve of his boyfriend's for shoes to be worn anywhere near a bed.

"I've been better," Adam lamented, pushing his hood off of his loose curls. "Can't say this is how I imagined us spending spring break, but." He shrugged. "Hey- can you pass me my glasses?"

Caleb plucked the half wire-rimmed frames from where they rested precariously on his boyfriend's cluttered nightstand and passed them off to him.

"Ah, that sucks," Adam muttered, leveling his gaze on Caleb.

"What?" Caleb asked, shuffling up the bed to lie closer to the other boy.

"You still look like a worried dork even with these on," he commented with a sly grin, flicking the edge of his glasses for effect.

Caleb barked a loud laugh, scrubbing his hand over his closely shaved hair. "Asshole," he quipped back.

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, before you ask again, I'm feeling fine. Better now, in fact, that you're here. Mom's been keeping me cooped up in here lest I taint the house what with her _important_ dinner tonight."

"So," Caleb said. "What I'm taking from this is that I'm pretty much your savior from a night of mindnumbing boredom."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Adam grinned, pleasant Pinks swirling into view.

Caleb finally scooted up the final few inches to the head of the bed and rested his head on Adam's shoulder. That way he, at least, wasn't directly in the line of metaphorical fire from Adam's germs.

They settled together like that, Adam procuring his laptop from seemingly nowhere and resting it in his lap, pattering out his password quickly before opening Netflix.

"Whose turn is it to pick?" he asked.

"Yours," Caleb replied easily, remembering last week when he'd picked a documentary he'd been eyeing.

While Adam clicked through his list, chipped or completely stripped of color nails slipping the cursor all over the screen, Caleb looked over his room.

The first time he'd ever set foot in the room, he thought his power had gone haywire. It had been back when they were still tentatively friends, when they could barely look one another in the eye and had yet to find their comfortable pattern of bickering.

It had been before Caleb truly knew Adam, and so he was expecting something dreary to match the sad boy he'd been presented with.

He got nothing of the sort.

Adam's room was a burst of color, a frame of it in the middle of a black and white film. Cheerful yellows, swirling oranges, raging red; Adam's room was a fire and it was sunset and it was so unmistakably him that Caleb felt like he couldn't breath the first time he'd witnessed it.

There was a desk pushed in the far corner beside the large window, the desktop and the window sill alike in their stacks of books and crumpled papers and appalling amounts of pens.

Beside the desk, and trailing down the wall to the closet door, were bookshelves. Darkly stained wood that matched the desk in a way that was too perfect, in a way that silently screamed money beyond belief.

The shelves, while piled high with all sorts of books - classics that Adam loved to hate, biographies on the weirdest collection of people, stacks of graphic novels, and a collector's set of Twilight that he didn't like to acknowledge - were also stocked with stacks of haphazard CDs and a few odd cassettes, with the bottom shelf of the case closest to his desk being filled with records.

Caleb loved Adam's bookshelves. There were piles of change thrown around in front of old editions of Langston Hughes, little figurines posed in front of Jane Austen, vials of nail polish obscuring worn copies of Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, and Unfinished Tales, as Adam had been quick to point out on so many occassions.)

"Hey," Adam called softly, snapping Caleb from his silent reverie.

"Hm?" Caleb asked, turning his face up toward his boyfriend.

"Movie's starting."

Caleb hunkered in, not sure what to expect. Much like his bookshelves, Adam's taste in movies and TV is scattered. He could be agreeable to one of Caleb's nature documentaries one day, watch the newest action flick the next, and keep you up to date on all the upcoming comedies in between.

Which is why when Caleb focused on the screen, he shouldn't have been surprised. 

Adam, as Caleb had check many times, was not an empath. He was, however, attentive, and also, Caleb couldn't keep his emotions off his face of he wanted to.

"It's a classic," Adam griped before Caleb could utter a word.

"I don't think you can call it a classic if it came out in 2004, babe," Caleb replied mildly.

"I can and I will," Adam retorted, pointedly upping the volume. Caleb couldn't help the grin that spread across his face.

\-----

"Are you crying?" Adam asked gently - an hour and a half later, the credits still rolling on the screen

"No," Caleb replied, then thought better of it. "Yes. A little. It's the _doll house_."

"I know." Adam laughed brightly, squishing his cheek against the top of Caleb's head. "I've seen this movie a few dozen times."

"I have _too_ , that's what's stupid," Caleb whined back, taking Adam's hand in his and rubbing gently at his knuckles.

"It's a classic," Adam repeated.

"It's a classic," Caleb finally relented.

The sun went down about half an hour before, and so they're sitting in near darkness, the only light being that from the hall and from the dark-sensing nightlight that Adam keeps plugged in by his door.

They stay there, in half darkness and not-quite silence - as the dinner party happening below them won't allow that to happen - and synch breaths and close eyes for longer than is required to blink.

Caleb looked down to their clasped hands where his thumb keeps a continuous stream of motion, taking in, once more, Adam's chipped polish.

"I don't think I've ever seen your nails not painted to perfection," Caleb commented softly, his thumb reaching to scrub gently across Adam's own thumb's nail.

"I kept sneezing and I wasn't trying to have to replace the comforter I've had for the past four years because of a nail polish mishap," Adam replied, but there was something akin to disdain in his tone as he surveyed his nails. "It's weird, though. I don't like it."

"D'you want me to do it for you?" Caleb asked simply.

"Do what?"

"Do you want me to paint them, dork."

Adam paused, then, "You know how?"

Caleb snorted. "Yeah, I know how. I was so fascinated by it when I was little that I bugged my until she taught me."

"Shit. How am I just now finding out my boyfriend's a nail painting virtuoso?" Adam joked.

"'Cause you only love me for the fact that I've got a face like this," he said, gesturing grandly to his pouty expression. "Never bothered to find out anything else."

Adam snorted, pushing on Caleb's shoulder playfully as the latter hsuled himself up and out of the bed. "You caught me," he said jokingly. "Good looks and a propensity to cry over early 2000s romcoms, that's all I'm in this for."

Caleb grinned. "Called it."

He headed for the light switch, flipping it on before he made his way over to Adam's desk and tugged the bottom most drawer open, rifling through it before pulling a tiny bottle of acetone from the back corner where it sat under a couple notebooks and discarded batteries. The cottonballs, as Caleb suspected, were tucked in a Ziploc right beside the bottle.

"And you know where I keep all my remover shit, too?" Adam asked around the tissue in his hand, obviously impressed. He discarded it in the trashcan to his right and pumped sanitizer from the industrial sized bottle of Germ-X his mother had left on his nightstand for him as Caleb headed back toward the bed.

"Just like I know you have a container of Beanie Babies in the top of your closet and an old Star Wars monopoly set that's missing half the money under your bed and three different packs of playing cards in your nightstand for when you want to deal yourself a game of pyramid solitaire," Caleb rattled off, coming to sit back in front of his boyfriend.

The colors around then shifted into what Caleb could only interpert as a question mark. Pale Orange and…some kind of putrid Gray-Green. 

"I've seen the Beanie Baby bucket every time you forget your jacket; the monopoly box was from when I showed up that time while you were spring cleaning - I guessed about the missing money, 'cause if they own a board, then whose set _isn't_ missing money. The cards are from every time you sent me after your glasses or chapstick or a piece of your astoundingly large bookmark collection," he explained.

Caleb could feel Their Green begin spiraling around him, mixed with a Blush Pink, a slight Yellow, and oddly enough, a stripe of Violet. He watched as the grin creeped farther onto Adam's face, pushing his cheeks up into the bottom frame of his glasses.

He unscrewed to cap off of the acentone, swished it onto a cottonball, and then reached for his boyfriend's hand, which was willingly given. 

Through all this, Caleb continued to speak.

"You believe that poetry books should go with classics, but you still keep your copies seperated on different shelves because you like to keep your poetry front and center so you can see them from your bed, but you can't stand to upset the balance any farther by putting all your Jane Austen and Brönte sisters in the middle of your novels.

"On that note," he began again, scrubbing chipped black polish away. "You buy cheap, secondhand copies of all your favorite poetry books so you can tab and highlight them to hell and back without remorse.

"Your CDs aren't arranged alphabetically or by genre, but instead by the mood they put you in when you listen to them. You collect pens like a fucking raccoon collects shiny things, and you have more pens from the bank than any teenager has the right to. You own two sets of backup earbuds at all times, and you keep them next to your contact solution and other pair of clunky glasses - aka, your emergency situations, no one not even me is allowed to touch it, kit."

He swiped a dry cotton ball over the now clear nails to remove any excess moisture before he undid the lid on the nail polish that Adam had procured at some point - probably from his bottomless pit of a nightstand drawer.

"I know I'm only an empath," Caleb said after Adam didn't say anything for a while. "But I can hear your mind racing right now. I don't…" he stopped, looking for the words as he swiped paint over Adam's right index finger. 

"You deserve to be known. And I like knowing you. All of you. So I guess I just started tucking stuff away, y'know?"

Violet smeared across the canvas in its brightest form, so much that it pinched in Caleb's chest, took his breath away. 

"I can feel you getting sappy," Caleb commented lightly as he looked up - eyes tracking eyes and dimples and lips. "And you get squirmy when you get sappy, so unless you want me to fuck this up-" he continued, screwing the lid onto the tiny bottle so he could retcon the small splash of paint that had made it onto Adam's skin.

Adam pressed forward, connecting chapped lips to chapped lips, palms to cheeks and noses to undereyes in a whirlwind of movement.

"Watch the polish," Caleb hummed against Adam's lips.

Adam laughed softly. "It's fine, I know a great guy who can redo them for me."

\---

Adam's mother liked to take the stairs two at a time - as a child she'd found it to be thrilling, but now, in her own home, it was a matter of efficiency.

Her fingers grazed the banister, rounded nails ticking against the dark varnish easily. Once at the top of the staircase, she slipped out of her confining heels for a few blissful moments. 

She wiggled her toes against the carpet, exhaling deeply for one quick second before she set off down the hall.

As she approached it, she realized Adam's door was as she'd requested it to be: wide open. If she could say nothing else about Caleb Michaels, he was a respectful kid.

The closer the she got, the more she could hear - soft laughter pooled over the threshold, followed by the vibrations of banter too low for any outsiders to decipher.

She paused just outside the doorway, taking in the scene before her.

Adam, ruffled hair splayed across his forehead from where he was hunched in half, blanket still drawn around his shoulders, and lips pulled into an untouchable grin.

Caleb was bent over Adam's outstretched hand, taking the time to painstakingly swipe a thick clear coat over each of Adam's painted nails as the boy faintly teased him about something.

They traded banter like love notes, so plainly in love anyone would be able to see it, and she couldn't help the pride that swelled in her chest.

She and Adam had had their ups and downs, but it was these moments, these moments where she truly understood.

Times were changing, he was growing up, and he was making this stunning life for himself full of people who cared for him so much.

When she had first looked into his eyes after he'd been born, before life came and did what it did best and complicated, the first thing she'd hoped for was nothing more than for him to know love for the rest of his life.

It was now, when she heard the sure-spoken I love yous that she realized he'd found that, found that all on his own. She'd never doubted, but she'd worried, and now she realized there'd never been a reason to.

Because whether it was just a cold or any of the other number of things life would try to throw at him, he would be okay. He was strong - which they'd begun teaching him, but he' finished all on his own - and he was kind and he was so, so loved for when strength and kindess weren't enough.

Faintly, she smiled, before tapping on the door with the rise of her knuckles. "How's it going in here?"

**Author's Note:**

> yes they watched 13 going on 30, no i dont feel any regret.
> 
> i just wanted to write abt caleb painting adam's nails and now there's 3k and a dash of motherly introspection tht i felt the intense need to add in yikes gksnfmsn
> 
> anyway find me on tumblr @desertrosetico where youll routinely find me gushing abt this show


End file.
